I dunno. Deleting posts doesn't drive me as crazy as those people who use a script to edit all there comments on Reddit to say "this comment has been deleted". If you make a comment, it's public, and should remain so! Personally, I wish Reddit would disable edits to posts and comments, as well as deleting posts and comments, once they've been posted for over an hour.

I forgot, what was he asking advice for? Yeah, I remember that ordeal, funny stuff.

So I read a really interesting article about this sort of thing that I searched and searched for and cannot find again.

Anyways, the gist of it as much as I remember was the experiences of someone who worked in blindness research and tech and who recounts being regularly approached by inventors with ideas they were sure would revolutionize blindness.

These ideas were often, of course, things that already existed, things that were impossible, or things that we simply do not want or need. Time and resources were then spent convincing (or at least trying to) the inventor of this. But many of these inventors remained just as convinced as ever that their ideas were great, and they just needed help or money or resources to make it happen. Most of the time they had nothing but good intentions, and were just trying to help, but they just didn't understand the problem or the solutions. They were people who might have otherwise been able to positively contribute to things that blind people actually want or need done, but did not go on to do those things.


In my personal experience with these sorts of things (especially as far as software and computer hardware goes) I have seen enough vaporware, half-baked products, and abandoned projects to find the situation frustrating. But I have never been able to gently dissuade a person from their invention, nor point them in the direction of work that actually needs to be done. Often times the person will double down as to why their product is necessary, that I don't understand and they're just trying to help, or will insist that it might be for a different "type" of blind person (for example, someone with less vision, because they perceive this to mean less function, or someone with poor blindness skills.)

I'm not at all saying this is or might be the case with the person you are referring to who deleted their post, but there is certainly no denying an undercurrent of many of these projects: to help blind people, but only in a way that is their idea, with them getting the recognition (or the cash) for a singular revolutionary thing they have done. There is also often a severe underestimation of the technical challenges of their project, no real capacity for good follow through, and yet there is a little bit of expectation that they're doing something good and praiseworthy by "helping the blind" or even just trying to.

I will note that in the case of the actual deleted post, nobody was at any point rude to them as far as I can tell. But I hoped to be able to (with a back and forth dialog that never happened) give the OP an opportunity to research and think about the limits of their own knowledge and abilities, and the real feasibility of and justification for the project they were proposing. But their answer was that they could literally note no differences whatsoever between the product they wanted to develop and existing screen readers, that there was not one function or feature that they could name that they planned to implement. They understood their own limitations, and said they had a lot to learn, and deferred to their advisor several times. But this did not change the fact that they believed that what they were doing was not only possible, but potentially useful enough to pursue graduate studies on.

How do you try to help someone who is talking about inventing a product with no known features or functionalities, which competes with a product they can't use, have no apparent technical development skills for, and have no real understanding of the functionalities involved?

/u/OneFishTwoFish/ offered them a very useful, practical list of alternative suggestions of projects that a student could realistically hope to finish over their course of studies, and which could actually have some useful application, but they did not receive a reply.

Maybe they made a throwaway account just to ask and ended up deleting it.

Did he? I messaged him with an offer to give feedback. Shrug